[COMP04] Mike Russo's Reviews
Mike Russo
set (a quick Google Groups search for my name should turn up my '02
reviews, which containt a quick blurb about my biases); unfortunately,
since I'm back at school, I didn't have the time to make this year's
as comprehensive as I would have liked, but that's life, I suppose.
If I occasionally don't support my assertions or dispose of a game
without sufficiently evaluating all of its elements, mea culpa, and I
hope the thrust of analysis survives these weaknesses. Likewise, if
I'm overly blunt or leap to an unfounded judgment, my apologies; I
know I have tendencies towards snarkiness, and I suspect I haven't
subjected the reviews to enough editing to root it all out.
My overall impression was that this year's crop of games tended more
towards the mid-range; lots of solid, well-implemented games, with
very few massively ill-considered entries, but also fewer real
standouts. This is probably a good thing – more newcomers entering
the field and writing competent games which cover all their bases is
good for the hobby, as they'll hopefully go on to more audacious works
later. Still, this tendency combined with the greater number of games
this year did make some periods of the comp a bit less exciting than I
would have wished. Still, there was certainly plenty of creativity on
display, from old hands and first-timers.
My numerical scores are really fairly arbitrary; I try to evaluate the
game on its own merits as well as judging the originality and ambition
of the work, which leads to a rather idiosyncratic scoring system
whose results are hard to post facto justify. Perhaps a more
systematic approach, breaking the score down into component parts,
would be more transparent and provide a fairer guide to authors;
something to consider for next year, I suppose.
I used the COMP04 randomizer; the order below is the order in which I
played the games
As always, major kudos to the authors and organizers for all their
hard work and keeping the IF scene vibrant.
-Mike Russo
//
Splashdown: Splashdown was an appropriate start to this year's comp;
it's a solid game with some entertaining flourishes, but ultimately it
feels somewhat weightless, as it's a bit lacking in follow-through and
the concept is more then slightly timeworn. To the author's credit,
the initial waking-up-out-of-cryosleep sequence is well done, despite
the weight of countless similar scenes in other games throughout the
ages, with good attention paid to the more immediate, tactile
sensations, rather than jumping right to the technology and larger
story. Overall, this is a good approach for the start of a game,
especially one which runs such a high risk of falling into cliche.
Unfortunately, this immediacy is quickly undercut by two things:
first, the response to X ME being the hair-pulling default "as good
looking as ever", and the massive wall 'o in-jokes. Don't get me
wrong, I examined each of the bodysicles, and appreciated the
inclusion of Lost in Translation references in addition to the more
conventional ones to cyberpunk and Star Wars, but I think it might
have been a bit much – I spent probably five or ten minutes going
through them all, and had to restart the game as a result. Probably
this is just a lesson that I should be less anal, but I think cutting
down on the number of references or putting them somewhere other than
the very beginning of the game would have made for a more effective
piece (oh, and while on the subject of me being anal, I noticed that
Leonard Nimoy's name was misspelled).
On to the game itself. The writing was pleasantly transparent, but
the lack of scenery was noticeable; room descriptions felt relatively
complete, but many of the objects they mentioned weren't susceptible
to examination. I generally loathe time limits, but this one was
relatively forgiving, and taking too long was much more likely to lead
to a lower score than catastrophic failure, which is a reasonable
approach. No such ameliorative principle applies to the
flashlight-with-limited-battery issue, however. On the plus side, the
puzzles were generally logical and well-clued. Allocating power
between the different systems was fairly enjoyable, and the cell phone
conversations were an entertaining added touch.
The robot sidekick seemed to hold out some promise at first, but I was
disappointed with how underutilized it was. As far as I could
determine, it only played a role in two puzzles, neither of which was
particularly complicated or engaging. It did display a reasonable
awareness of its surroundings and the condition of the ship, however,
and made the familiar tromping-around-a-broken-spaceship a bit more
bearable. Still, on a gameplay level, I didn't feel it added that
much. I should probably mention that I never played Planetfall, so
perhaps the eyes of nostalgia would see this homage in a more positive
light.
Finally, special mention must be made of the accompanying
documentation, which is slick and enjoyable, not to mention
unintentionally hilarious (one hopes that the line trumpeting ".96%
the gravity of home!" is a typo, rather than an evil marketing ploy).
Still, overall Splashdown is rather pedestrian – competent puzzles,
competent writing, and a few entertaining embellishments which don't
quite manage to make it anything special.
6
Murder at the Aero Club: Murder mysteries are hard, in static fiction
or interactive. Pacing is key – the slow sense of discovery, as
avenues of investigation open up and hit dead ends. So is ambiguity;
mysteries are at their best when multiple possible interpretations
(and multiple possible murderers) are reasonably plausible, and the
intellectual exercise of foreclosing each possibility in turn and
deducing the true culprit is one of the major payoffs of the genre.
Murder at the Aero Club has a distinctive premise – it's set at an
Australian airfield, which seems to have been drawn from real life –
and boasts a light, breezy style; unfortunately, pacing and ambiguity
are thin on the ground.
The game is a mystery, but it's sadly lacking in the suspense and
richness of detail required to do justice to the genre. Most
damningly, there's never any real doubt as to the murderer's identity.
All the evidence points one way, and one can't confront any of the
NPCs about it before making your accusation (indeed, the game doesn't
actually allow you to accuse anyone besides the actual suspect).
There are no ancillary secrets, no red herrings, the NPCs are flat and
prone to gnomic pronouncements (Haagen and his family being the most
egregious offenders) – it's mystery-by-numbers. The puzzles are just
as straightforward as the plot, and thus there's no real sense of
accomplishment at discovering the murderer.
Which is a shame, because the premise really is entertaining, and the
game is solid, especially that this is the author's first work. I
didn't run across any bugs, and as mentioned, the writing is for the
most part clear and enjoyable. This is a promising start from a
first-time author; still, I wonder if perhaps a different choice of
genre (comedy-adventure a la last year's Gourment or this year's Sting
of the Wasp, perhaps?) would have been a better fit for the author's
style.
5
Blue Chairs: This game shouldn't work. The literary allusions are
forced and don't really cohere. The balance of realism and surrealism
is cock-eyed, so that after the initial scene the player is swept away
on an overlong wave of dream-logic which ultimately edges towards the
monotonous. The puzzles are a mix of the reasonable, the evocative
and the peremptory. A central symbolic motif never quite swims into
focus. It all wraps up with the hoariest cliche imaginable.
Yet work it does, with more than enough panache to spare. Yes, all of
the above problems are inarguably present – the sequence in the
maze-complex or whatever it is does drag on too long, I'd never think
to look on the back of the fortune if the walkthrough didn't tell me
to, and the whole Dante-and-Beatrice angle made me roll my eyes. But
man, it just doesn't matter. I'm willing to concede that a good part
of my goodwill towards this game is a result of its peculiar
aesthetic, and particularly the author's knack for description, which
comes off like Clockwork Orange by way of Freaks and Geeks. Most of
my notes for the game consist of memorable one-liners: the first NPC
we meet is "simultaneously thinking of fucking some cheerleader's
brains out and calculating how many XP a red dragon is worth", while
"putting on a dungeonmaster grin". All of the dialogue at the party
manages to be both clever and absolutely true-to-life, which is a neat
trick indeed. The narration wonderfully convey the PC's personality –
sardonic, detached, and yearning for meaning. Even when the prose
doesn't need to do any heavy lifting, the author manages to toss off
an offhand gem; I don't even remember the context for many of the
lines littering my notes, but even on their own they're great: "A
miracle of genetic instinct and secular humanism"; "a faint smell, the
kind that ought to trigger an old memory but doesn't".
The puzzles for the most part live up to the off-kilter yet sharp
aesthetic of the prose. Nothing's more natural than getting drunk in
order to dance better (or at least not notice that you're dancing
poorly), and the sequence where you're forced to assign tag-lines to
the major characters does a good job of forcing the player to
recognize some of the thematic work that's going on beneath the
surface. I do think they get noticeably weaker in the second half –
the entire sequence in the darkened passageways slows the game down,
and the sharp NPC interaction which enlivened the party is
conspicuously absent. Finding a hidden safe combination and
navigating a maze which adds rooms as you go just didn't seem
activities which inhabited the same universe as the rest of the game.
The sequence in which the player trudges across the desert as George
W. Bush, on the other hand, was brilliant. Possibly my personal
beliefs brought more to this scene than the author intended, but
floundering across the sand, attempting to justify a horrible mistake,
definitely brought to mind the Iraq war, and made me feel the queasy
sense of uncertainty that the PC suffered. I'm unsure how well this
scene would work for anyone else, or indeed at any other point in
time, but as far as I'm concerned it was the single most effective
moment of the comp.
Again, I don't mean to elide the game's real problems – all of those
above mentioned, and it must be conceded that the prose does lurch
towards wordiness on occasion. But there's real ambition on display
here, and the places where everything clicks, it works about as well
as anything in IF can possibly work.
8
Chronicle Play Torn: "As good looking as ever." Certainly not the
most inelegant clause ever committed to monitors, on the face of it;
it admittedly boasts a modicum of affable cleverness and
self-depreciation. One might quibble with the absence of a hyphen,
but I concede that that's firmly a matter of personal preference.
Still, when I get that response to the second command I type in a game
(X ME, of course, right after ABOUT), it always provokes a grimace.
It bespeaks one of two possibilities: either the author has
deliberately left the default description in place in order to convey
to the player that the PC avatar is a cipher, a blank upon which the
player should project his or her identity, or not, as the case may be,
because it's unlikely to matter much in the puzzle-fest to follow
(although I have toyed with the idea of writing a game with an
Existentialist approach to PC description; it starts out as "good
looking" and slowly evolves and metastasizes into the outside world as
the player makes choices to define him/herself). Alternatively, it
just means that the author didn't get around to changing it, either
because they were really strapped for time or just didn't think it was
important. None of these are particularly cheering prospects, I find.
It's unfair to start a discussion a game with a rant about PC
descriptions, of course – the above paragraph could have prefaced at
least half a dozen other reviews – but somehow it feels appropriate
here; just like "as good looking as ever", Chronicle Play Torn has its
modest charms, but there's a too-familiar vibe and an overall
sloppiness which bleach it of enjoyment.
Oh, and the inventory limit, which is just killer.
It should be noted that the author doesn't appear to be a native
English speaker, but he does a reasonable job nonetheless; indeed, I
often found the sometimes-awkward prose to be enjoyably off-kilter.
Indeed, it helped render the otherwise-tired premise (investigate the
house of a missing occult-obsessed uncle) at least slightly
distinctive.
Things start out reasonably well, with only a few puzzles to work on
at any time and fairly good sense of what one should be doing next.
Sadly, after two relatively self-contained chapters, the third one
thrusts the player in the middle of a large area, with a number of
puzzles whose relevance is hard to intuit and no real clue where to
start. Prodigious displays of insight are suddenly required (if
there's a clue pointing towards what the mushroom is for, I certainly
didn't find it outside of the walkthrough). Your items get stolen at
random, and it's possible to have the game put itself in an unwinnable
state if the wrong item gets taken. There's a fair bit of freedom
here, and apparently one can win the game in a number of different
ways, but since the player never really understands what's going on,
instead of providing a sense of agency, all of this choice is just
frustrating. Additionally, Torn is pushing at what I consider the
reasonable length limits for the comp – I wound up just typing in a
good chunk of the walkthrough in order to get through it before two
hours were up.
So much for the major flaw. There's some technical wonkiness –
WinFrotz crashed when I entered the water without first stashing away
my possessions – and generally there aren't as many synonyms as I'd
like (after CLIMB BED didn't work, I wouldn't have thought to try
STAND ON BED). The overall Lovecraftian feel, with its
intentional-or-not gloss of J-horror, was enjoyable; sadly, the
puzzles and structure of Torn made it a chore to play.
4
Typo: I have a suspicion that the typo correcting function on display
here is a very impressive technical feat; if integrated into later
games, it could well cut down on what's perhaps the major source of
annoyance when playing IF. Still, the game wrapped around this
marvelous function leaves something to be desired. It reuses the
popular "real-life IF" conceit found in last year's Recruit and to a
lesser extent in the author's previous Janitor, but the one-room
machine puzzle here is notable for its aridity. It all works
reasonably well, and it's nice that the game keeps track of the
various methods by which you can manage to kill yourself, but reading
a manual and setting up what feels like a glorified printer really
wasn't enough to hold my interest.
4
I Must Play: a game of minigames is sort of like a sitcom clips show:
even if the disparate parts are individually strong, the overall
disjointedness is difficult to overcome without a compelling frame and
sustained internal linkages. None of that's on offer here; instead,
we have separate IF implementations of a number of different arcade
games of yore, with an Independence Day reference thrown in for good
measure. I have some nostalgic feeling for most of them – especially
Duck Hunt, which is inextricably linked in my brain to the synthesized
chuckle of a schadenfruede-filled hound – but I still wasn't induced
to care about this game especially much. The puzzle in which the
player must give a strong pro-gun speech on the Senate floor in order
to give a hunter in a different game more firepower was clever, but
the rest of the puzzles were far more straight ahead, and I doubt
whether discrete, atomistic chunks of cleverness can really add up to
compelling IF experience. Things are pleasant enough (although I did
catch more than one typo – alert Seebach!), but "pleasant" is a far
way from "great".
4
Zero: I ranted about hunger puzzles at length in my review of last
year's Delvyn; new year, new game, same author(s?), same annoying
hunger puzzle. I won't indulge myself in a retread; suffice to say,
if your game has a hunger puzzle, there'd better be a good reason for
it, and Zero doesn't have a good reason for it.
Putting that to one side and looking at the merits, the best and worst
that can be said about Zero is that it's boring. Taking a
goblin's-eye-view of a generic fantasy world is an amusing conceit,
but rather than using this as a launching-off point for entertainingly
devious and amusingly craven hijinks, we're instead presented with a
slightly-glorified scavenger hunt. One explores all the different
locations, replaces missing items, then re-explores to see what
counter-intuitive result putting a goblet on a table seems to have
triggered. The writing edges towards the entertaining, and there are
a few enjoyable NPCs, but the gameplay feels underdeveloped. Nowhere
is this more obvious than in the endgame: after completing the
stultifying "gather" portion of the game, the player is finally
assigned an interesting task... which is completed automatically, as
the game gurgles forth large blocks of noninteractive prose. Sadly,
the static story at the end is far more involving than the archaic
object-placement "puzzles" which make up the meat of the game; if the
focus had been shifted to the interesting stuff, Zero could have had
some promise, but as is, there's little to recommend.
5
Kurusu City: I confess: the neological adjective "iron-fistedly" made
me laugh out loud. I'm not sure whether this slightly ungrammatical
construction was used intentionally or not, but its loopy, slightly
overblown associations extend to the rest of the game; Kurusu City is
set in an anime-inspired city ruled by obsessive-compulsive robots
(not content merely to crush the spirits of the city's citizens, they
micromanage to the point of actually dragging individual students to
school if they're the slightest bit late) and inhabited almost
exclusively by attractive women (I haven't gone back and checked, but
I'd wager they all have different day-glo hair colors, too). The
conceit is entertaining enough, and there are a few fun puzzles
(faking injury in order to get into the hospital is a highlight), but
unfortunately a few missteps undercut the game's effectiveness.
Primary among these is the aforementioned dragging-off-to-school.
After this happens the first time, it's relatively easy to escape; the
second time, however, I got stuck in the math class from hell, with no
way out in sight. While the transcendentally surreal nature of the
repetitive questions was fun at first, nothing I tried was sufficient
to get me out of there and back to the game. Since it's very easy to
get ambushed by robots without any warning, this was a hard-to-avoid
game-ender. Beyond this, description leaned towards the sparse, and
the city overall felt fairly schematic. Part of this is due to its
wide-open nature; rather than directing the player's exploration, most
locations are available from the get-go, which makes for a slightly
disorienting experience of trying to figure out which puzzles are
immediately solvable, and which come later. There are quite a number
of NPCs, and many of them present at least the rudiments of a
personality, but they do little besides inhabit a stereotype. I
noticed a few bugs – OPEN MIRROR returns "I can't open the ." – and a
typo or two, but nothing too distressing. Without the purgatorial
math sequence, I probably would have played this one to completion,
but after my truant PC was retrieved for the third time, I couldn't
motivate myself sufficiently to finish the game. Which is too bad –
with a bit more focus, a bit more detail, and with a clearer way out
of that cul-de-sac (at least in the hints file!), Kurusu City could
have been an enjoyable ride.
5
Goose, Egg, Badger: More a sandbox than a story, Goose, Egg, Badger
feels like a collection of rather clever easter eggs and
proof-of-concept systems smashed together in one package. There's
certainly nothing wrong with this approach, but I must confess it
doesn't appeal to me personally – I like more fiction with my
interactive fiction. Still, if you enjoy virtual playrooms, you'll
probably like GEB quite a lot. There are animals to annoy, appliances
to manipulate, food to be cooked, and more. There are two distinct
ending conditions, and as far as I could tell, a different final block
of test depending on exactly what score you wind up with (and since
there are 100 possible points, this is rather a large number of
distinct "endings"). The verbification of nearly all the game's nouns
is clever, and there's a certain wankerish glee in egging cows, cowing
apes, and apeing geese. As an anthology of rather contextless
cleverness, GEB works quite well; again, it just isn't my cup of tea.
6
All Things Devours: I'm usually not a particular fan of games which
are just one big puzzle (see "Typo", above), nor do I have any special
affection for "old-school" games which can be rendered unwinnable by
sneezing at the wrong place, but I liked All Things Devours quite a
lot nonetheless. Part of this is surely due to the documentation –
the game plays fair, and states up-front in the ABOUT text exactly
what the ground rules are. This is definitely the right approach –
rather than belatedly realizing that my saved game is useless and
cursing the author, I was able to engage to game on its own terms.
Greatly aiding my enjoyment of ATD was the prose, which possesses a
bit more flair than is really required to pull off an abstract,
meta-puzzley game such as this one. The PC description admittedly
made me roll my eyes a bit, both because it's slightly extravagant and
because the gorgeous female MIT grad student seems like a bit of a
wish-fulfillment character, although of course such do exist – I
certainly met more than a few during my time at Caltech. And
portraying her as dowdy and asexual would have annoyed me as well, for
buying in too strongly to the stereotype. Perhaps I just find the
depiction of female sciencey characters somewhat problematic in
general; it's hard to sail the ship of characterization between the
poles of stereotype and pandering. Regardless, despite this one early
issue, the writing is of high quality, and effectively plays up the
tension by relying on terse, declarative sentences fraught with
threat.
The puzzle itself is well-implemented and well-designed; I had the
"aha!" moment when I figured out what was going on, and after that, I
was able to sit down and figure out the solution both through
trial-and-error and deduction. It's neither too arcane to be
solveable, nor so trivial that once one twigs to the concept, it's
basically over. This is puzzle design at its best and most
satisfying.
The scope of the game is of necessity somewhat limited, and if you're
looking for plot or characterization, you're barking up the wrong
tree. But it's hard to imagine a better implementation of an
abstract, brainy thriller than All Things Devours.
7
Identity: sadly, Identity suffered from the vagaries of Comp04's
randomization puzzle; upon loading it up, I immediately thought "hey,
it's Splashdown, but with amnesia!" This is more than slightly
unfair, of course, and the games go in different directions soon
enough, but I think the lesson is clear: if your concept starts with
the PC waking up out of cryosleep to find himself on a malfunctioning
spacecraft, you'd better have some extra hook somewhere to keep your
game distinctive (this principle is generalizable, of course, e.g. to
waking up in your apartment and getting ready to go to work).
The game itself is largely inoffensive. One largely self-contained
puzzle leads to the next, without much concern for setting unity or
mood. Everything's lighthearted and low-stress. A few sloppy details
mar the presentation – I had to play guess-the-verb to buckle up, and
the COMPUCOM feels a bit underutilized. Oh, and I would kill for a
game which would make CONNECT and ATTACH synonyms. Overall Identity
is a solid first attempt; it's just that none of its features rise
above a general level of bland competence.
5
The Great Xavio: A solid attempt at a Holmes-and-Watson style buddy
mystery, the Great Xavio doesn't quite come together as well as it
could; some elements are too straightforward, while others are
needlessly obfuscated, and the NPC interaction isn't robust enough to
really get the pair-of-sleuths approach to click. Additionally, the
game doesn't transition from debunking-expedition to murder-mystery
very smoothly; I was interested in discovering Xavio's secret, and to
suddenly find that it was besides the point, and I was actually meant
to do something completely different, was disappointing.
With all this said, the Great Xavio is technically solid, and boasts
multiple solutions to many, if not all, puzzles. One unfortunate side
effect of this, however, is that the game can sometimes feel a bit
disconnected and overly rich in red herrings. There are meant to be
two built-in help systems, but neither seemed to do much good; Dr.
Todd always seemed to spout the same unhelpful platitudes, and
THINKing wasn't nearly as fruitful as one would expect. Indeed, Todd
is a major missed opportunity; he's definitely got a distinctive
voice, but it feels overexaggerated and starts to wear at one as time
goes on, especially as he doesn't appear to ever contribute much of
worth to the investigation. The player should certainly be the one
doing the work, but Todd doesn't seem to react to much of anything,
and his list of known topics feels rather truncated.
As in Murder at the Aero Club, there is a dearth of plausible
suspects, although at least there are initially two. The evidence is
also overly conclusive; individual clues generally point only one way,
and don't require any extra work to make useful. Again, this is due
to the difficulty of the form, but it still doesn't make for a very
satisfying experience; I'd almost rather see the PC and Todd solve
things more on their own, rather than dumbing the clues down so far.
Ah well. I suspect I'm being overly critical, and indeed, the game
was a lighthearted bit of fun; indeed, if only Todd had been a bit
more interactive, I probably wouldn't have found so many nits to pick.
6
A Light's Tale: Nearly any game which involves a story which can be
altered by player input has to deal with the railroading problem. One
can work to allow as many player actions as one can imagine, but this
approach is labor-intensive and can lead to nonsensical and
pacing-free narrative. The alternative is to put the game on rails,
to one degree or another. The best authors are able to arrange things
such that the "correct" course of action appears intuitively obvious,
and set out a few critical decision points where the player can feel
like they're collaborating in the narrative. A Light's Tale has a
third take: it's on naked, unmistakable rails, and it berates you any
time you even think about getting off. Needless to say, this isn't a
very appealing prospect, and the regular typos, nonsensical setting,
sloppy design, and clumsy prose don't exactly gild the lily. My notes
for this one consist of one imprecation after another, but I'm too
demoralized to run through all of them in detail; suffice to say, I
didn't find much to recommend this one.
2
Die Vollkommene Masse: I realize that this game was withdrawn, but I
just had to say something: if your game requires me to put panties on
a doll in order to win, could you at least make this a transparent,
easy process, rather than force me to spend five minutes wrestling
with the parser, furtively glancing over my shoulder to make sure that
nobody can read what I'm doing? Thanks.
The Big Scoop: The Big Scoop is a mostly well-implemented
investigation story, which doesn't really have any stunningly good
moments but is nonetheless solid and enjoyably designed. The early
identity-shift is effective (even if the initial timed puzzle is a bit
unforgiving for my taste), the puzzles are generally intuitive
(although the improvised grappling-hook does strike me as a bit
contrived), and the story, while unspectacular, does build to a
satisfying conclusion. The writing is reasonably evocative,
especially given that the author appears to be a non-native speaker.
Despite all this, the game never really grabbed me; the initial murder
is horrible enough to involve the player, the pacing is fluid, and new
layers of the mystery get peeled back at a satisfying rate, but still,
the game never really clicked with me. Possible this is an accident
attributable to the randomizer – the games immediately preceding this
one were fairly annoying and fiddly – or perhaps there's some
undiagnosed problem which kept it from really engaging me. I do like
games set in a present-day milieu, the investigative gameplay wasn't
too involved but was certainly reasonable, the NPCs were of above
average quality in terms of what they could talk about, but the strong
elements didn't combine to stun me, for whatever reason. I realize
this makes this review rather unhelpful, but that's the best I can do.
6
Square Circle: Square Circle initially seems like a contrived logic
puzzle abstracted from any sort of context, but it quickly telescopes
out, broadening the palate of its gameplay and turning a geometrical
exercise into a clever bit of social speculative fiction. In the
spirit of full disclosure, I'm a law student, and thus the well-done
description of the fictional criminal justice system sucked me right
in, although I could easily see a less susceptible reader finding it
overly dense and overly long.
Indeed, the entire opening seems to telegraph a direction different
from where the game ultimately goes; the "draw a square circle" test
and the book of geometry leads one to expect Square Circle will be one
of those schematic bits of IF where random puzzles are shoddily
integrated into a narrative framework barely worth mentioning. Still,
the initial puzzle is intriguing enough to keep one moving through it,
although I do have a few nitpicks; I'd expect some combination of READ
BOOK, X BOOK, and X INDEX to indicate that the book has most of its
middle cut out, and I was disappointed that my initial idea for how to
satisfy the jailor's requirements wasn't successful (I drew a square
on the rubber sheet, then tried to deform the rubber by stretching it
over the globe until it looked like a circle). I was very much
impressed by the strength of implementation; this puzzle is almost
inherently a visual one, but the process of drawing the required shape
is nonetheless relatively intuitive, and I had much less trouble with
syntax than I'd expected.
Once outside the jail proper, the game opens up in both scope and
theme. Certainly the world isn't terribly original compared to the
famous fictional dystopias, but Square Circle nonetheless manages to
achieve a fair bit of immersion. The outside world feels
appropriately gray and blanched of joy and meaning. Some of the
puzzles in this section are a bit more conventional, but most of them
sport multiple solutions, which adds to the pleasure of solving them,
not to mention that each solved puzzle fills in a bit more of the
backstory and thereby lends importance to the overall proceeding. The
last puzzle is fairly straightforward, but while the correct action is
rather obvious, it also feels pleasantly diabolical, leading to a
satisfying resolution.
The worst one can say about Square Circle is that there are some
moments of thematic fogginess; given the world and the PC the player
inhabits, it feels odd to do so much conventional adventuring in the
mid-game. Still, the early twist and well-designed puzzles drew me
right in, and the ending very much delivered. Not much more one could
ask for.
8
Sting of the Wasp: If ever a game were a guilty pleasure, Sting of the
Wasp would be it; the overall plot is pure soap-opera, the NPC
interactions are all about eking out the maximum amount of cattiness,
and puzzles derive their enjoyment value from pure spite. Which is to
say that it hits its design goals exactly. Guiding the super-snob
player character on a rampage through a high-end country club
inhabited by people even more deserving of comeuppance than you do is
entertaining on its own, and it's all the more so when combined with
the viciously funny descriptions and withering repartee on offer.
Indeed, the game's great success is in setting the mood. Part of this
is due to the author's strong writing skills – there are some
laugh-out-loud moments, such as the PC's observation that a half-eaten
bowl of salad bespeaks some rival's lack of willpower in sticking to
her diet, and the dialogue is razor sharp – but much of the heavy
lifting is done by the robust world simulation. NPCs will remark on
the items you're carrying around, smells are implemented, and the
scenery is both dense and well-described.
All of this very much reinforces the sense of immersion, but it's the
puzzles which really nail the feel. Without exception, every puzzle
you solve winds up advantaging you at somebody else's expense, whether
it's through property damage, blackmail, exploiting a dangerous
allergy, or just destroying some poor old lady's hair. The PC goes
about her wicked business with flair and panache, and it's hard not to
cackle at her exploits as long as one isn't encumbered by too many
moral objections (which isn't too hard, in a farce this enjoyable).
There are a few flaws – I think there's a bug with the exit
descriptions on the dining terrace, and the social comment is a bit
too easy to be worth anything other than a few cheap laughs – but they
do little to detract from the overall experience. The author knew
exactly what he was going for, and the prose, puzzles, and
implementation all work together flawlessly to convey his caustic
vision.
8
Stack Overflow: As far as I can determine, in the opening ten minutes
of Stack Overflow, the PC three times gets suddenly shunted to a new
location with no warning and no obvious rhyme or reason. Jumping the
player into a radically different world can be a good way of creating
interest and hooking the player in; unfortunately, its overuse here
does little besides create whiplash. By the time the meat of the game
starts, it's unclear if there's meant to be any tissue connecting it
with what's gone before; I'd call it dream-logic, but the scene
transitions lack even the symbolic linkages one expects of a dream.
Instead, the game is bleached of all context, and whatever the
author's intention, the motivationless player is stuck solving
freestanding puzzles on yet another abandoned space station.
Some of the puzzles are reasonably interesting – although I'm still a
bit confused by the logistics, the toolbox-stealing sequence was
fairly entertaining, and putting on punk music to get into the proper
mood for smashing was intuitive and enjoyable. On the other hand, if
even the walkthrough concedes that a machine-manipulation puzzle is
boring, the design on that one should probably be rethought. The
writing isn't anything special, but while the author doesn't appear to
be a native speaker of English, the prose flows along reasonably well,
despite some questionably constructed syntax ("near the mailbox
crudely attached to an iron pole the path splits into two"). A few
bugs seem to have slipped in – one location described as an east-west
corridor didn't appear to actually have an east exit, necessitating a
restart when I couldn't leave via the locked western door. The ending
yanks the PC to yet another location, and at least recalls the
opening, but there's nothing resembling a sense of closure
(admittedly, I skipped the boring puzzle, so perhaps the best ending
explains it all). The various frames, the game's title, and the reams
of junk text which print out over the credits imply that the author
was trying to work towards some sort of theme or narrative
progression; unfortunately, the game at the middle of the work doesn't
appear to have much to do with any of that.
4
Blink: Blink reminds me of Jane, a game from the '02 Comp. Jane was
an earnest attempt to use Photopia-style narrative techniques to
address issues of domestic violence. Unfortunately, it didn't invest
nearly enough in the setup, leading to a real lack of emotional
connection with the characters, and it felt uncomfortable to be
attempting conventional IF behavior in such a context. Additionally,
there wasn't much player agency, and removing the element of choice
really undercut the effectiveness of the work.
Most of the above criticisms can be leveled at Blink, and I think they
hit even harder. Foremost among its problems is that it attempts to
cram far too much emotional weight into far too little narrative. The
opening sequence is reasonable enough (although if I were the author,
I would have arranged things such that one was forced to do a bit more
exploring before finding Duncan – my first playthrough, I missed
Harry, which lead to a rather shallower narrative experience than I
think the author intended), but the others are too compressed to be
really engaging. Less than two turns elapse between the beginning of
the first vignette and the time the crisis erupts, and without a
chance to settle into the characters' routine, the radical change
which is introduced feels weightless. The next sequence involves a
puzzle which feels decidedly odd in context, and again the important
action takes place far too quickly, and with no player involvement –
the death of characters who've been introduced barely three paragraphs
before fails to really register. Indeed, the overall lack of response
to player input feels like a missed opportunity; there are a number of
fairly distinct dialogue choices through the beginning of the game,
but polar opposite choices don't appear to have any effect on the game
world or, indeed, on the PC's personality.
The final allegorical sequence is again simply too overwrought to
really be effective. These are important, interesting themes the
author is wrestling with, and I'm sympathetic to his point of view,
but Blink doesn't effectively grapple with the issues; in the absence
of meaningful character development and any sense of player agency, it
comes off instead as a histrionic recitation of platitudes.
3
A Day in the Life of a Superhero: By the same author as last year's
Sophie's Adventure, A Day in the Life suffers from the same
significant flaw – it's too large and nonlinear for a two hour comp
game, for my taste at least. The opening is clever and works as a
good introduction to the character and the milieu, but after that,
things start to go downhill. There are a fair number of locations
open from the get-go, and several more become available as one goes.
A few of these are adequately self-contained, but others require
objects from other areas to become solvable, and a few of them can't
be easily left once started (I'm thinking of the mall, where it's easy
to get locked in a closet with no obvious way out, and the factory,
where the death-by-cat timer doesn't reset when you leave the area and
it's easy to get killed as soon as you re-enter). It doesn't help
that the puzzles are generally somewhat gnomic; handing out lottery
tickets to delinquents didn't strike me as obvious, and I wound up
with a variety of objects and no real sense of what they'd be useful
for. As a result, I spent most of my time with the game frustrated
and floundering, occasionally wandering into a situation unprepared
and having to restart. Some of the dialogue is funny, but overall the
setting feels like it's trying too hard to be zany. Probably this is
just personal taste – I'm generally a fan of more understated humor –
but it did wind up grating as I wandered the streets aimlessly
searching for something useful that my PC could actually accomplish.
Overall, the feeling I was left with was simple enervation, which
might unfortunately be as much due to the game's placement in the
Comp04 order as anything else; still, A Day in the Life never did
anything to excite me, which isn't particularly superheroic, now that
I think about it.
4
Order: Another year, another promising game by John Evans which
doesn't quite nail the execution. Perhaps this is an unfair
characterization – Order is winnable, and its central gameplay
mechanic is broad enough that a complete implementation is probably
impossible. Still, there are enough sloppy mistakes and oversights to
undercut the game's effectiveness: the PC is clearly meant to be
special, but X ME returns only "as good looking as ever". A room
description mentions a dome, but the game only responds to the noun
"steeple". I thought CREATE LADDER was an obvious solution to one
puzzle, and the author apparently agreed since it was included in the
hints, but the action wasn't allowed in the game itself. These aren't
fundamental problems by any means, but they are annoying, and bespeak
a lack of care.
Which is too bad, because the premise really is interesting. Throwing
the gates wide open and allowing the player to create nearly any
object they can imagine is a clever conceit, and leads to puzzles
which have multiple possible solutions, most of which are reasonably
intuitive. Still, this promise isn't quite realized. The
elemental-themed puzzles have disappointingly blunt solutions; indeed,
there's not much room for cleverness or improvisation here. Further,
the characters are highly schematic, and I'm pretty sure I missed
something story-wise, as the final sequence seemed to presuppose some
knowledge on my part which I hadn't seen anywhere. There's a time
limit, which doesn't serve much purpose. The prose has moments of
strength, but isn't enough to carry the game on its own.
Again, I feel like Order had quite a lot of potential, but the shallow
implementation really prevented its strengths from shining through.
The author's games are definitely getting more complete and more
solid, but Order needed a final layer of polish to rise above the
merely average.
5
PTBAD3: When I started to write this review, I glanced over my notes:
they read, in their entirety "no idea what's going on here. Opaque,
uncompelling presentation." Which, entertainingly enough, describes
the notes as well, since after reading them, I still couldn't remember
anything about this game. So I restarted it, and felt a shock of
recognition at seeing the odd glowing top hat. I must confess I got
stuck after playing this one for about five minutes, and saw no
prospect that muscling my way through would be in any wise rewarding.
There seem to be some interesting ideas going on in the author's head,
but they're not conveyed to the player in any meaningful sense; being
told that "when you move, you sometimes feel yourself in a picture or
sound for a brief moment, before it is gone" is interesting, but
ultimately frustrating absent any context, immediacy, or explanation.
Maybe there's something deeply compelling going on, but all I found
was surrealism for its own sake, without even much room for
exploration. All of this made the point of the exercise rather hard
to divine.
2
Trading Punches: How far can a game get primarily on the strength of
its prose? Pretty damn far, it turns out. Trading Punches is a
fairly typical science fiction game, with the requisite gimmicky alien
race, melodramatic intrafamily conflict, and last-minute revelation
which doesn't quite gel; it's stultifyingly linear, jumps around too
much for its own good, and, it must be said, boasts a notably silly
name (and it fails the X ME test). Yet it was one of my favorite
games of the comp, primarily because the writing is so strong. The
author goes to some trouble to address all of the senses – most
notably the tactile – the various locations are distinctly immediate
and immersive as a result. The descriptions linger over the feeling
of skipping a stone, the quality of the ambient light, the subtle heat
emitted by a wristwatch. The plot jerks the player from one event to
the next, often separated by a wide stretch of time and space, and it
isn't the rather tacked-on frame which unifies things; it's the
familiar warmth of the prose.
As alluded to above, the game does have its weaknesses. NPCs are a
particular problem; there's no real ability to interact with them in
any way. One can have conversations, but they all proceed
automatically. Indeed, there's a troubling absence of player choice
throughout the game – even the decision to kiss a girl or not is taken
out of the player's hands. The narrative takes too many detours;
there's a certain spine to the thing, but too many extraneous,
unexplained elements interpose themselves. There are some high points
unrelated to the writing – the execution of the drinking puzzle is
pleasantly smooth, as each cup gets a character's name appended as an
adjective as it is used, and indeed most of the game's puzzles are
fair and well clued (although I'd argue this is again at least partly
due to the strength of the writing). That strong prose easily carries
what would otherwise have been a rather mundane game into the ranks of
the good; further prequels or sequels fleshing the story out would be
most welcome, if the author can retain his stylistic chops.
7
Gamlet: "Audacious" doesn't begin to do justice to Gamlet. Harry
Potter by way of Portnoy's Complaint with a soupcon of Shakespeare;
kabbala, pubescence, the luminous, somehow innocent attraction that
sin holds for those just cresting adolescence; there's a lot to take
in here, and the author's voice is bold and assured, weaving together
the abstract and the vulgar to devastating effect. The writing is
elliptical, content to take its time and draw the player into the
world at its own pace. Themes and echoes are everywhere.
Frustratingly, though, this pregnant, compelling premise is swallowed
up by overcomplicated puzzles which aren't sufficiently integrated
into the game. Perhaps I'm just not clever enough at coming up with
solutions, but it felt like important objects weren't always
mentioned, and some of the puzzles seem to presume more knowledge and
perspicacity than I could muster. I'm still not sure where the clock
combination came from. As a result of the difficulty, I found myself
forced to the walkthrough sooner than I would have liked, which broke
the spell of immersion the game had been weaving up until that point;
the fact that instead of evoking an "ah-ha!" the solutions left me
wondering how I was supposed to come up with this stuff didn't help
matters.
Worse than the difficulty, however, is the way that the puzzles become
more and more contrived as the game progresses. Lighting a lamp,
finding a hamster, raiding the kitchen; these are all reasonable
actions, and a certain degree of spelunking in the PC's father's study
makes sense given the premise, as well. But too quickly, the game
falls prey to increasingly arbitrary puzzles, with little connection
to the story beyond the necessity of padding the length. The game
very much lost me once I entered the elevator; this new, fantastic
world felt colorless and generic compared to the dim, claustrophobic
house below. There's a symbolic logic which continues to work even
here, and the prose continues to be strong, but ultimately the latter
portions of the game are a disappointment.
Overall, Gamlet perhaps tries to do too much; cramming so much
characterization and puzzling together is a tricky business, and the
game might have been better served by privileging one over the other.
As it is, its skewed, distinctive vibe makes it one of this year's
standouts, but its flaws do far too much to weigh it down.
7
The Realm: The Realm is an inoffensive little game. The conceit is a
particularly worn one, the writing neither elevates nor degrades the
rest of the proceedings, and the puzzles are a decidedly mixed bag.
The armorer dialogue-puzzle is a fun variant on a riddle-game (and
boasts an alternate solution for those who don't enjoy such things),
but the rest can be somewhat cryptic (basic considerations of
cleanliness prevent me from even considering TAKE URINE as a
reasonable course of action absent the most extenuating of
circumstances). The plot is lighthearted and the pacing is fluid; if
the puzzle design was consistently stronger, this would be a
dream-confection of a game.
4
Ninja: this feels more like a proof-of-concept than a full-fledged
game. Is this parser functional? Yup (although I did get some odd
behavior where the game kept kicking out ">20" in response to my
input). Are ninjas cool? Check. Not much more to it than that;
there's only really one puzzle, which practically solves itself; the
prose is appropriately minimalist; the mise en scene possesses a
certain gravity; but overall there's not enough game there to make
much impression.
2
Getting Back to Sleep: Completing the Waking Up Alone On A Spaceship
trifecta (see Splashdown and Identity, above), GBtS at least has a
gimmick to differentiate itself: it runs in real time (at last, a
custom parser with a raison d'existence!) Sadly, I'm not sure what
the feature adds, exactly; a real time limit is in some ways less
annoying than a turn limit, since one doesn't need to worry too much
about typos killing you, but it does add a kind of low-level,
omnipresent urgency, reminiscent of a faint headache, to the entire
proceeding. NPCs move around on their own schedule, rather than
everything happening at once when a command gets typed, but again, I'm
not sure this is actually a substantive improvement. Perhaps part of
my lackluster response is due to the fact that I've never been a
particular fan of realism for realism's sake, when it comes to game
design – features should buy you something, gameplay-wise. If a
particular gesture towards realism increases immersion, all well and
good, but honestly, I found the ticking clock did more to jolt me out
of the game than anything else.
Anyway, on to the merits. The plot on offer, as can perhaps be
deduced from my rather disparaging intro, isn't exactly breathtakingly
in its originality. Likewise the prose, which suffers from a few
errors (man, confusions of its and it's annoy me); the puzzles aren't
anything to write home about, either. Eliciting an item from the
robot seems to require a rather absurd skill at guessing-the-noun
(better than the verb for a change, I suppose), and I don't tend to
enjoy having to wander around in a maze searching for an item, even
after I've found my way to the other side. I did notice one coding
problem; a door appeared to spawn multiple copies of itself every time
I tried to open it, which was presumably unintentional rather than
some postmodern stab at indicating infinite regression.
Overall, the impression I'm left with is one of wasted potential; the
ability to run things in real time could have opened up all sorts of
possibilities for clever obstacles and solutions, and welding it to a
fairly standard set of puzzles and making use of it only as a crude
countdown clock strikes me as a missed opportunity. Tighter
integration of key features, story, and puzzles would have resulted in
a much stronger entry, whose technical sophistication would have
elicited more than a shrug and a "so what?"
4
Blue Sky: Blue Sky is schizophrenic: on the one hand, it tries to
present itself as a leisurely exploration of a particular place,
faithfully recreating landmarks and ambiance, while on the other it
tries to tell a linear story which imparts a fair sense of urgency.
These disparate design goals ultimately get in each other's way; upon
entering the game and being told "go here! Solve this puzzle! You're
running late!", the player's likely to take things at face value, and
direct their work towards achieving that particular goal, rather than
taking the time to poke around and explore the details at their own
pace. The author clearly wants to convey the beauty and uniqueness of
Santa Fe, but the color is lost in the stampede to the puzzle – a
realist travelogue as directed by Jerry Bruckheimer.
I exaggerate slightly, but I do think the author would have been
better advised to rethink some of the puzzle design. Rather than
shuffling the PC from one location to the other, always being told
that you've just missed your chance, something more sedate might have
drawn the player more deeply into the city; a scavenger hunt style
puzzle, or some attempt to synthesize the details of local custom and
history into some sort of meta-narrative. As is, in the context of a
conventional, goal-driven work of IF, the descriptions are a bit too
long and indeed clumsy from a gameplay perspective to be truly
effective. It doesn't help that there's some sloppiness on display
here – a few typos, unreactive NPCs, a default response to X ME. The
writing is fine enough and the setting holds potential; unfortunately,
the game-y bits practically scream at getting bolted to this
framework, and the overall gestalt fails to satisfy.
3
Ruined Robots: Given that it includes two of my major IF peeves
(failure to include a non-default response to X ME and hunger puzzles,
for those of you keeping score), it's perhaps unsurprising that I
wasn't a particular fan of Ruined Robots. The premise is at least
moderately interesting – discover the dirty laundry of a reclusive
Bill Gates figure – but the game doesn't have much else to recommend
it.
Foremost among its sins, to my mind, is the overall sloppiness.
Capitalizations come and go. Articles are improperly interjected into
sentences in a grammatically painful manner ("You foolishly place your
The hands in the fire.") I'm not quite sure what's up with the
ubiquitous Yen symbol; presumably that at least is intentional. Many
objects seem to lack an in-setting reason for existence, and the
puzzles are likewise inadequately clued and poorly integrated.
Scenery which is mentioned in the default location descriptions is
explicitly disclaimered as unimportant when you try to examine it more
closely. And so on. At least there's a walkthrough, but after
starving to death, I couldn't muster up the enthusiasm to type it in.
The photographs are neat and evocative, though, especially the first
one, which seems to come from a different game entirely. You could
build a neat lo-fi sort of ghost story around it, come to think.
Still, that's rather a slender reed, as far as redeeming qualities go.
3
Magocracy: Magocracy is a fun idea, an attempt to inject a bit of
IF-style adventuring into a combat-based MUD paradigm. There are some
neat flourishes, novel puzzles, and the potential for truly emergent
gameplay and nonlinearity, but overall I don't think the integration
was entirely successful. The strategic possibilities the game seems
to offer didn't really seem to ever be realized; too much combat
reduces to brute force, as the player often doesn't have access to the
relevant counterspells or has a clearly superior alternative. The
beginning is perhaps a bit too brutal, as many enemy characters start
out quite close to the PC, making survival a matter of dumb luck
and/or headlong retreat. It's also frustrating to have the game put
itself in an unwinnable state through no fault of the player's own –
in one of my playthroughs, the enchantress character dominated quite a
menagerie, including another of the rival wizards, while I was off
attending to other business, and there was simply no way to defeat
her.
Overall, I never felt like I had very much control in Magocracy; there
were too many NPCs crowding in at once, I started with too few spells,
and having my conventionally IF explorations constantly interrupted by
forced combat made me feel like I was always just reacting to whatever
was thrown at me, with success basically coming down to whose die
rolls were luckier. There's certainly some appeal to this sort of
gameplay – I've played my share of NetHack – but I really wish the
equation had been tilted a bit more towards the IF side and included a
bit more in the way of player agency.
5
Luminous Horizon: Years in the making, the Earth and Sky saga finally
comes to a triumphant end. All the stops are pulled out – both
characters are fully playable, leading to enjoyably synergistic
puzzle-solving, long-standing mysteries are resolved, though the focus
is properly on action rather than explication, and it even comes with
a Story Thus Far comic. Elegance is everywhere on display, from the
completely in-character hint system to the question-and-answer which
integrates the results of your playthroughs of the previous games in
the series. And those sound-effect blocks never get old.
Picking up right where part two left off, Luminous Horizon does sadly
involve a slightly pedestrian setting – yet another corridor-filled
sci-fi installation – but the set-pieces are dense enough and the
forward momentum rapid enough that one only notices in retrospect.
Likewise, the evil plot isn't particularly interesting in of itself,
but as an excuse to indulge in some property damage for justice, it
more than serves its purpose. Banter between the siblings makes a
welcome return, and it's context-sensitive, entertaining, and gives
the floundering player some guidance besides. Overall, the narrative
elements once again fit the genre and mood perfectly – Luminous
Horizon simply screams "four color supers."
The puzzles likewise are completely in-genre. There are no real
object puzzles to speak of – it's all about the clever use of each
sibling's superpowers, singly or in conjunction. Many puzzles appear
susceptible to solution by either character, allowing the player to
pick a preferred approach. There's almost always some action going
on, but one never feels too rushed, since the character who isn't
being controlled can generally keep the heat off the active PC's back
long enough to figure out the best approach. Each section of gameplay
is self-contained and clearly set off from the others; while this may
lead to some disappointment ("you mean part two is over already?!"),
it works to focus attention on the particular crisis at hand and keep
the aimless wandering down to practically zero.
It's clear that attention was paid to the smallest detail, and the
game was extensively tested. Switching from sibling to sibling, even
in the middle of complicated scenes, never resulted in continuity
errors or pronoun bugs. Even somewhat nonsensical actions like PUNCH
ROAD return a sound effect and a terrible pun. And just when you're
thinking that Fire and Rain seems familiar, one character makes the
James Taylor reference. Death is possible, but it's always obvious
what killed you, and how to go about preventing it. All of this makes
Luminous Horizon a pure pleasure to play.
Niggles? A few, I suppose. I spent a fair bit of time experimenting
with the gizmos, but could never find a real use for them. They were
certainly interesting, but the tinkering felt a little odd, in
context. The sequence with Fire and Rain took me a little while to
figure out, since I wanted Earth and Sky to both do something
simultaneously. The ending might be a little abrupt, although part of
that could just be me not wanting the series to be over. Overall,
though, these nitpicks do nothing to diminish what's one of the most
enjoyable bits of IF out there.
9
Auriga: I realize that Auriga was disqualified, but I just have to
say, if you're going to rip off the Aliens, you should at least make
them scary. "This creature is certainly an efficient chewing machine"
surely counts as the most prosaic description of Giger's horrors I've
ever read.
Mingsheng: Mingsheng features a pleasantly minimalist style, an
engaging concept, and one very clever puzzle; unfortunately, most of
the rest of the game doesn't live up to its promise, and overall there
isn't quite enough content here for Mingsheng to really make a lasting
impression, outside of that one puzzle.
Mythic China is a wonderfully suggestive choice of setting; many of
the familiar fantasy tropes are present, but the presentation feels
completely fresh. The prose is lucid and compact, as befits the
subject matter, and the landscape fits the tone perfectly. The first
half of the game is very good indeed; the idea of having a puzzle
which requires the acquisition not of objects or knowledge but of
insight is very adroit and entirely fitting. Unfortunately, there are
a few rough edges, in the prose (a run-on sentence in the initial
description, a capitalization error here and there), the
implementation (THROW BOX IN OCEAN really should have been a supported
syntax for throwing the box in the ocean), and the design (that the
last puzzle involved a glorified game of rock-paper-scissors was
disappointing after the first martial arts puzzle). Still, the
overall experience is quite smooth. And that first puzzle really did
impress me (I can't really evaluate the success of the author's use of
Chinese orthography, as my interpreter lacked the fonts at issue, but
the gesture towards authenticity was appreciated nonetheless).
7
Redeye: Redeye attempts to ape a particular genre of thriller, in
which the protagonist is ineluctably drawn towards a moment of
horrifying revelation where all the preceding circumstances are
revealed to be part of a malignant design, whose contours are only
visible at the exact moment it becomes impossible to stop. Sadly, it
commits the cardinal sin of the genre: everything that happens is so
obviously contrived, and the twist is so easy to see coming, that the
climax is greeted with a rolling of eyes rather than a gasp of shock.
Oh, and it fails the X ME test.
The game is competent enough; the details of the initial situation are
compellingly plausible, and the sense of place which inhabits the
opening setting is enough to lure the player in. The puzzles are
never particularly difficult and all make sense in context, which is
as it should be, as they help keep the story moving along. But
everything's so obviously on rails (if I don't have enough money to
pay the cabbie, at least let me threaten him with the shotgun to stop
him from beating me up!), and the chain of circumstance which unspools
from that promising beginning is so implausible that that sense of
immersion, of connection, is snapped. The PC is forced to perform a
variety of ill-advised actions (everything from the police station
till the end, basically), and the "master plan" winds up looking more
like a Rube Goldberg contrivance of authorial fiat than anything
credible. A general dive into the seedy underbelly of Australia would
have made for a terribly engaging, original game; it's too bad the
author tried to push the plot so far into silliness that Redeye's
strong setting and well-integrated puzzles don't count for as much as
they should.
6
Orion Agenda: Comfortable and assured, Orion Agenda is a solid an
example of modern IF craft. There's an easy balance of story and
puzzle, the setting is well-realized albeit derivative, and the prose
is mostly unobtrusive. There's nothing particularly excellent or
egregious which stands out; I'd almost be tempted to call this
eigen-IF. Which isn't to say that Orion Agenda is bland or has little
to recommend it; quite the contrary, I think many authors could look
to it as a template for their own work. The puzzles are complex
enough to be satisfying, but are very well-clued (in that the sense
that the player often has a rough idea of how to go about finding a
solution, and, crucially, is also almost always given enough guidance
to identify the puzzles). The PC is given a few gadgets which are fun
to use but which don't overpower the gameplay. The story isn't
particularly flashy, but it manages to squeeze in a modicum of
character development and make use of a few advanced narrative
techniques here and there, like the flash-forward deployed in the
opening. There's a competently-executed NPC sidekick, a few different
endings, and a reasonably engaging mystery to unravel. There's
something for everyone here, pretty much.
Indeed, even the flaws have something of the universal about them.
The writing occasionally feels a bit stilted; the story perhaps relies
on some knowledge of Star Trek for its weight; and there's at least
one instakill and one way of rendering the game unwinnable (although
it does warn you before taking the latter action). These are fairly
mild failings, all told, and leaving aside terrible linear-algebra
comparisons, Orion Agenda is, in the best sense of the word, an
enjoyable, unpretentious entertainment.
7
Who Created That Monster: This game is puzzling on a number of
different levels, most notably the conceptual: if you're going to the
trouble of documenting the relationship between Saddam Hussein and the
US, why would you ultimately pin it on Luxembourg (in fact, upon
reading the walkthrough, it's worse than this – a different country
bears the blame every time one plays)? A political work of art which
fails to follow through isn't particularly valuable, in my opinion,
and Who Created That Monster comes close to spreading disinformation,
and its mix of cynical political comment and gamist arbitrariness
isn't particularly effective.
Indeed, the game as a whole weds sharp observation – its depiction of
a future Baghdad overrun by product endorsements and clueless
Americanization is wryly amusing – with simple incoherence. The blurs
of "historical" information appear with no rhyme or reason, all the
embassies seem to share one curiously noneuclidian basement, and NPCs
wend their way into the story without much in the way of motivation
or, indeed, sense. The player is given only the sketchiest
information as to the central goal, and the individual pieces of
"evidence" unearthed, as mentioned above, are never really commented
on or integrated into the setting and plot. They might as well be
differently colored crystals, for all the effect they have on
gameplay.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I should probably say that I
disagreed with the Iraq war, and think there's rather a lot to
criticize about Reagan-era foreign policy. Still, despite being
sympathetic to the political message putatively being conveyed, I
still didn't enjoy Monster all that much. It doesn't have the courage
of its convictions and never stands up and makes its case straight.
Avoiding the facile and the conclusory is a worthy goal for political
discourse, but once you're in the position of having your art make a
statement (and by making a work of IF so clearly about a controversial
and ongoing issue, the author has definitely put himself in that
position), you'd better have something to say. I've got nothing
against polemics, but mealy-mouthed, gnomic polemics make for hard
reading, even if you think you might agree with the general thrust of
what they're getting at.
4
01: Apparently jail is the new cryopod; there's another game and a
half in this year's crop which start out this way (Square Circle and
Stack Overflow, respectively), and I recall a few similar openings
from years past. Going in, I have to say that the README did little
to inspire confidence; nor did "BETA 1.2" floating up in the corner of
the interpreter window. Sadly, this impression was borne out; 01
doesn't appear to do anything too novel with the idea. Indeed, it's
almost a stereotypical first game, with a limited, unoriginal milieu,
bog-standard puzzles, and an ending which isn't at all conclusive.
The puzzles are a bit fiddly – the mirror behaves especially oddly –
and the only really memorable touches are the inclusion of a dynamic
vomiting script and a gratuitously offensive gay thug. These
particular flourishes didn't exactly do much to endear the game to me,
predictably enough.
3
Bellclap: Finally a game that goes the extra mile: both X ME and X YOU
work! That on its own would be enough to put me on Bellclap's side,
but the juxtaposition of Old Testament milieu with the British-valet
narrative voice did even more to win me over. There's some
interesting stuff going on here; the player appears to be a god of
some sort, the parser appears to be said god's agent or advisor, and
the object of the player's commands is the titular Bellclap, an
itinerant laborer. This confusion of viewpoints makes for some
compelling confusion, and jumbles together action, hints, and results
in a satisfyingly integrated fashion. Admittedly, the puzzles are
perhaps a bit too difficult – there's a symbolic logic at work which
is sometimes well-communicated, but at other times comes out of
nowhere – and there's not as much content here as I'd like, which
leads to a rather stunted narrative. The incident which forms the
meat of the game in fact seems a bit limited in scope, given the
player's identity; I was expecting something significantly more epic,
to be honest. Still, the premise is a strong one, and the game – what
there is of it – mostly lives up to it; I'd be eager to see a sequel
or a more robust re-release.
6
Nikos Chantziaras
> [Reviews]
For sanity's sake, split your messages if they're too big! My news
server went crazy.
Joao Mendes
"Mike Russo" <mar...@columbia.edu> wrote in message
news:bcc3a28.04111...@posting.google.com...
> Blue Chairs:
>
> The sequence in which the player trudges across the desert as George
> W. Bush
Oh? Why that particular US president and not any other?
> Orion Agenda:
>
> Indeed, even the flaws have something of the universal about them.
> The writing occasionally feels a bit stilted; the story perhaps relies
> on some knowledge of Star Trek for its weight;
Am I the only one who thinks that inspiration for TOA was Lloy Biggle Jr.,
rather than Star Trek?
Good reviews all around, though, I agree with most of what you said. :)
Cheers,
J.
Quintin Stone
> Ahoy, there, :)
>
> "Mike Russo" <mar...@columbia.edu> wrote in message
> news:bcc3a28.04111...@posting.google.com...
>
> > Blue Chairs:
> >
> > The sequence in which the player trudges across the desert as George
> > W. Bush
>
> Oh? Why that particular US president and not any other?
Well, because the scene begins with the following text:
January 20, in a Limosine
It's just before dawn, but you can tell it's going to be a fine day for
an inauguration, finer by far than 2000 -- too cold that day, too many
signs held up by the haters, the people who never understood that you won
it fair and square.
Do you honestly have another suggestion for a person who fits in that
situation?
/====================================================================\
|| Quintin Stone O- > "You speak of necessary evil? One ||
|| Code Monkey < of those necessities is that if ||
|| Rebel Programmers Society > innocents must suffer, the guilty must ||
|| st...@rps.net < suffer more." -- Mackenzie Calhoun ||
|| http://www.rps.net/QS/ > "Once Burned" by Peter David ||
\====================================================================/
Joao Mendes
"Quintin Stone" <st...@rps.net> wrote in message
news:Pine.LNX.4.58.04...@yes.rps.net...
>
> Well, because the scene begins with the following text:
>
> January 20, in a Limosine
> It's just before dawn, but you can tell it's going to be a fine day for
> an inauguration, finer by far than 2000 -- too cold that day, too many
> signs held up by the haters, the people who never understood that you won
> it fair and square.
>
> Do you honestly have another suggestion for a person who fits in that
> situation?
Hmmnno, I suppose you're right, though I had to ask around to come to that
conclusion. (Yes, I am that allergic to news and politics...)
To my mind, this is just a generic stock US president being reelected,
which, this being 2004, supports him speaking of the 200 election. I never
thought to associate it to the actual 200 and 2004 US president, although
clearly, that's a perfectly logical association.
As to "the haters that never understood that you won it fair and sqare",
like I said, I had to ask around to figure out that that might have been an
actual reference.
Cheers,
J.